Awkward
by AdenaMentzel
Summary: Private Practice Character study of Violet Turner. FYI-- written post-pilot epi...comments please?


Violet had always been awkward. One of the reasons that she had become a therapist was that she was never quiet satisfied with the ways that her own various therapists had diagnosed (granted, when she was a child, mental illness wasn't understood quite as well as they are now).

Violet had always been screwed up. She had always been one of those "gloom and doom" kind of people. She wore a lot of black, fishnets and eyeliner, and before it was the "in" thing for supposed "outcasts" to wear. She had, in her school, been truly unique. What she hadn't always been was frumpy. She had been thin, sexy and sexual—but still somehow awkward. She tended to stumble over her words or trip and fall. Her thing, long body had been a turn-on to all the wrong men, but even so she was hopelessly awkward and took longer than most to "grow into" her own skin. While she wasn't as tall as Addison by a long shot, she had always been obscenely thin. She had smoked because she had been "cool" (Quitting hadn't been hard. She only smoked in public and had actually hated it.) People who only knew Violet now, people like her patients and most of her colleagues, imagined her to have always been aloof and incapable of controlling her own life, which was true, but also of always having been unattractive and, she imagined, undesirable. That was not true. If people thought that this Addison Forbes Montgomery-formerly-Shepherd was a whore, they would have been rather appalled at Violet's past.

It was one of those classic cases of getting into too much too early. She had the wrong boyfriend when she was thirteen. Wrong because he was nineteen. Wrong because he was abusive. Wrong because he was hurtful and demolished any sense of self-confidence that she possessed. Wrong because he forced sex on her and she didn't know how to say no, because she didn't know that she didn't want it until it was already too late to turn back.

Cooper and Naomi were the only ones who knew these things. They were the only people that Violet had known long enough to trust completely. She had known Cooper the longest—they had actually met and become friends in elementary school, but his family had moved away before the insanity completely took Violet over. They didn't meet again until medical school. They hadn't ever been all that close, but at the same time, neither had all that many friends, either. Violet and Naomi had done undergrad work together. It had been a chance meeting—they were roommates, and thus stuck with one another for an insufferable year (at the end of which they decided that they really could be friends and requested one another as roommates and ended up rooming together all 4 years). It was due to Naomi that Violet began to break out of her anti-social habits, although she didn't reform from her deviant ways until much later on after an AIDS scare and almost lethal alcohol poisoning.

Once Violet decided that she didn't want to be that person any longer, she found it more difficult than she had thought to become a normal person. She still overstepped boundaries in normal conversation, accidentally going to far in every possible situation, accidentally hurting and alienating people when she was merely trying to get to know them by taking her absurd sense of humor several steps to far. At forty years old, she was seriously starting to doubt that she would be able to get past this and form a normal relationship. She didn't even have normal friends. She was pathetic and chasing after a man who clearly didn't want her, Cooper was chasing internet hookers who stole his car, among other things, Naomi and Sam got a divorce for no reason, and Pete was afraid to commit and probably never would again. Maybe everyone in the world was this crazy, she conceded, and maybe she should feel better knowing that she wasn't the only one who was completely and totally insane.

When Addison walked through the doors of the Oceanside Wellness Group, all Violet could think was "Damn, that woman can pull off her psychoses!" She resented that Addison could be so damaged and yet remain so incredibly hot and put together despite everything. Violet wanted more than anything not to be awkward, and at first glance, Addison was all elegance and class. And legs. Meanwhile Violet hid from her ex-boyfriend in the supermarket clad in frumpy sweats and granny glasses while chewing on a stolen grape. Violet's everyday wardrobe was professional, but Addison's was very please drool from a distance but don't you dare touch. No wonder every male back in Seattle wanted to jump her—she was class and Satan and come hither. It struck her that maybe that was an odd thing to envy—Addison's life had not amounted to much more than Violet's, and neither of them had a significant other or children to speak of. It should have occurred to her that she had only seen the tip of the iceberg that was Addison Montgomery.


End file.
